Inter-individual differences in conscious and unconscious robot-child interaction in children

Combined cognitive neuroscience knowledge with psychiatry and engineering knowledge,we have used the paradigm of listener-speaker to analyse un/conscious processes in association with emotion and language in neurotypical children aged 6 and 9 years old. The speaker was always a child;the listener was a Human or a Robot InterActor, i.e., a small robot which reacts to speech expression by nodding only. Unconscious nonverbal emotional expression reflected in physiological data, i.e.,heart rate, as well as conscious process mirrored on behavioral data, i.e., number of nouns and verbs in addition reported feelings, were considered. The results showed that 1) the heart rate was higher for children aged 6 years old than for children aged 9 years old when the InterActor was the robot; 2) the number of words (nouns and verbs) expressed by both age groups was higher when the InterActor was the human. Unconscious and conscious processes would not only depend on natural environments but also on artificial environments such as robots.